The Blog Growth Log: What I’m Actually Doing – Feb 2026
I relaunched this blog in February after an 8-year break. This is the first entry in what I’m calling The Log — a running, honest account of what I’m doing to grow it, what’s working, what isn’t, and what the numbers actually look like. No vanity metrics, no pretending it’s going better than it is, no pretending it’s going worse either.
If you’re building something similar, maybe this is useful. If you’re just nosy, same.
What I Built in February
Before I could write anything, I had to build the infrastructure. The site is on WordPress, and I spent a chunk of the month setting up the technical stuff that most people skip and then regret later.
That included Cloudflare CDN for site speed, a full Yoast SEO setup on every post, a custom plugin for a few site features I wanted that didn’t exist off the shelf, and a content architecture that could actually scale — categories, tags, internal linking strategy, the whole thing. I also set up Metricool to track social and site analytics in one place, which is what’s feeding the data in this post.
On the content side, I published 13 blog posts in February across beauty, style, home, and travel. That’s a lot for a first month, intentionally so — the goal was to get enough content live that Google had something to index and the site didn’t feel empty.
The Content Strategy
Everything I’m publishing is built around three things: SEO potential, personal relevance, and content I can actually talk about on social without it feeling like a billboard.
The SEO side means every post has a focus keyword, a Yoast-optimized title and meta description, proper heading structure, FAQ sections targeting People Also Ask results, and internal links to related posts. I’m also writing for LLM visibility — structuring content so it surfaces in AI search results, not just traditional Google.
The personal relevance piece is what keeps it from being generic. I’m a seventh-generation Texan living on a ranch in Bandera County with two Australian Shepherds and a husband who has strong opinions about chairs. That context shows up in the content. The Texas travel posts aren’t just travel posts, they’re written by someone who actually lives here. The style posts feature my actual clothes in my actual living room.
The social piece is where it gets more complicated, which I’ll get to in a second.
February Numbers: The Blog
The blog is brand new, so the website numbers are tiny and I’m not embarrassed about that.
69 total page views. 16 visits. 10 visitors. 78% of traffic from the US, with Texas making up 67% of that — which makes sense given the content focus and the fact that most of my current audience is local.
The top performing post was butter yellow nails with 8 pageviews, followed by the plate wall post and the Texas land spring maintenance checklist each with 4. Traffic sources were 79% direct and 21% Google — meaning almost everyone visiting right now already knows me from social. The organic search traffic is minimal, which is expected. SEO takes 3-6 months to build. I’m planting seeds.
What I’m watching: whether that Google percentage starts moving. That’s the signal that the SEO work is actually taking hold.
February Numbers: Instagram
11.82K followers. Total impressions for the month: 52K, up 29.69% from the prior period. I posted 39 times, which is more than double what I was doing before — up 116%.
The top performing reel by a significant margin was the Botox/face thinning post from February 11, which hit 19.43K views and 16.48K reach. That one took off because it touched something real — people are curious about what’s actually changing in someone’s face versus what’s filler and what’s just aging. Personal, specific, slightly vulnerable. That’s the formula that works every time and I keep having to remind myself of it.
The Facebook Marketplace chairs content (come with me to pick up my dream chairs / I found my dream chairs but there were only 4 not 6) performed well too — 7.2K and 2.8K views respectively. That narrative structure, the setup and the follow-up, clearly resonated.
The pajamas reel (“I work from home, so my fashion is pajamas”) hit 4K views with decent engagement. The thrift store grief post (“the one that got away”) got 3.4K views and 77 interactions — high engagement relative to views, which means the people who saw it actually felt something.
Where it got interesting: the Valentine’s Day photo of me and John hit 1,546 views on Instagram with 108 likes and a 15.2 engagement rate. That’s the highest engagement rate of any post this month. Personal life content consistently outperforms product and fashion content in engagement, even when it underperforms in raw reach.
The follower balance for the month was -8. Posting volume more than doubled and I still lost a net 8 followers. That’s not a crisis — it means the content shuffle shook some people loose who weren’t the right audience anyway — but it’s worth noting.
February Numbers: TikTok
6,630 followers. 16.68K views on published posts for the month, down 6.2% from prior period. 31 posts published, down slightly from before.
TikTok is behaving differently than Instagram right now. The content that performs best there has a higher engagement rate but lower raw reach — the “Being single beats being miserable” post hit 762 views but 13.65 engagement, the “Also when I’m clearly happily married” post hit 448 views with 15.63 engagement. Highly specific, emotionally resonant content that makes people feel seen is what TikTok rewards with engagement even when it doesn’t blow up on reach.
The conspiracy/ANTM post from February 16 is the outlier — 832 views and 13.58 engagement with 8 shares, which is the highest share count of the month. Shares are the metric I actually care about on TikTok because they indicate someone found it worth passing along, not just worth a passive like.
What’s Working
Personal and specific beats polished and generic every time. The content that touches something real — the face changing post, the grief of the thrift store find, the Valentine’s Day photo — outperforms everything else in engagement even when it doesn’t win on raw views.
Narrative structure works. The chairs series (I found them, then the follow-up about there only being 4) performed better as a two-part story than either post would have as a standalone.
Texas-specific content has a built-in audience. My Instagram followers skew heavily Austin and Central Texas, which matches the content I’m producing. That’s not an accident.
What Isn’t Working Yet
Instagram follower growth is flat. More content, same follower count. The reach is growing (+29.69% impressions) but it’s not converting to new followers at a meaningful rate yet. That’s a content-to-audience fit problem more than a volume problem — I’m reaching people but not giving them a strong enough reason to stay.
The website and social are still operating as separate things. Most website traffic is direct, meaning it’s coming from people who already know me. I haven’t cracked the funnel from social discovery to website visit yet. That’s the main focus for March.
TikTok views are slightly down despite consistent posting. I think the algorithm is in a recalibration period for my account — when you significantly change your content style or cadence, there’s usually a lag before the algorithm figures out who to show it to.
What I’m Doing in March
The March theme on the site is Refresh, which I’m treating as both a content angle and a mandate for how I’m approaching the strategy.
On the SEO side, I’m focused on Texas travel and outdoor content right now — Lost Maples, Caddo Lake, Hill Country spring content. These are high-intent searches with real traffic potential and I have a genuine angle as someone who actually lives here.
On the social-to-website funnel, I’m testing blog content callouts in reels — not “link in bio” language, but actual story hooks that make someone want to go read the full thing.
On Instagram specifically, I want to create more content that mirrors what’s actually on the site so there’s a clear reason for someone who finds me on social to visit the blog. Right now those two things are too disconnected.
I’ll be back at the end of March with numbers.
This is The Log — a week-by-week account of building Taylor, Sometimes from scratch. If you’re doing something similar, I’d genuinely love to hear about it.
